Building Ardour on Linux

Stop!

Do you really need to do this? We provide ready-to-run
packages of Ardour. Unless you are a developer with
experience compiling and building applications from source,
this document is not for you. Please go back to the
download page

We do not provide support for building from source. We do not
make regular efforts to keep this page up to date. Please do
not ask for help with this process.

Before You Start

make sure you have gcc/g++ installed. gcc --version will check this. You should ideally have
version 4.3 or above.

You will need git installed

You will need Python version 2.6 or later installed

If you want JACK support, you must have a suitably new version of JACK
installed. For JackOSX, version 0.89 or newer. For JACK1,
0.121 or newer.

Getting Required Libraries and Tools

Ardour uses a lot of software libraries to
provide functionality needed by the program. Before you can
build Ardour, you will need to make sure that your system
has all of the current
dependencies installed. You can do this using your
system's software update/install tool, or if you are
comfortable compiling source code, from the source code of
each dependency. Ardour developers in general do not provide
assistance with this task, so please don't ask us for help.

Building GTK+ (the graphical toolkit we use) from source
is a monumental task and can require a lot of other
libraries to be built and installed along the way. This is
particularly true on OS X, where many of GTK's own
dependencies are not easily (or correctly) available.

If you use your system software update/install tool, you
must have the "development" versions of all
packages. The "normal" versions are there to be able to
run software that uses the package, but they do not work
when trying to build other software.

Building Ardour 5.x

From here on, we will refer to the directory where your Ardour
source code is located as $AD. It does not matter
where it is located on your system. Typically it will be a
location such as ~/ardour

If building from git, checkout Ardour

cd $AD
git clone git://git.ardour.org/ardour/ardour.git
cd $AD/ardour

OR If building from a source tarball, unpack it

cd $AD
tar xf /where/you/put/the/src/tarball
cd ardour-<VERSION>

Now, the build

./waf configure
./waf

You do not need to install in order to use
your new build of Ardour. You can run it from within the build tree:

cd gtk2_ardour
./ardev

To install the results:

./waf install

To uninstall:

./waf uninstall

To clean up results of a build (objects, libraries, etc) use

./waf clean

Creating an Application Bundle

Ardour is distributed by ardour.org in the form of "bundles", which are nothing
more than a directory tree which contain everything the app needs to
run.